Longtime Laurel Park and Pimlico assistant starter Derrick Edwards dies

Derrick Edwards, a longtime assistant starter at Laurel Park and Pimlico Race Course, died June 20 after a career that put him in the gate for two of the most consequential Preakness Stakes in modern racing. He was one of the Maryland hands trusted to help load American Pharoah and Justify during their Triple Crown campaigns, work that rarely drew attention but helped shape some of the sport’s biggest starting moments.

Assistant starters live in the narrow space between a tense horse and a clean break. Their job is to load runners, keep order at the gate and help create the calm that makes a fair start possible, a task that has long been treated as one of the most dangerous in sports. It demands strength to handle frightened, high-strung horses and enough finesse to settle them without turning a race into a problem before it begins.

Edwards’s place in Preakness history was fixed by the two horses he helped stage for the gate. American Pharoah won the 2015 Preakness Stakes and went on to complete the Triple Crown that year. Justify won the 2018 Preakness Stakes and completed the Triple Crown later that season. Edwards was there for both, part of the starting crew behind two races that defined an era.

His career also connected him to a Maryland racing scene that is changing around the tracks where he worked. A 2025 state announcement said the 151st Preakness Stakes would run at Laurel Park on May 16, 2026, before Pimlico is rebuilt and reopened as the permanent home of Maryland racing in 2027. That shift gives added weight to Edwards’s decades at Laurel and Pimlico, where his work helped carry the sport through the kind of pressure-filled afternoons most fans remember only for the horses.

Edwards’s legacy sits in the gate, in the moments before the bell, when the right hands make sure the biggest races start the way they should.